This quiet, overgrown patch of Rhode Island used to howl.”

No names, just stones — and secrets

If you happen upon a lonely collection of stones on a quiet hillside in Portsmouth, you might think you’ve stumbled across an old stone wall.

Look closer. Those stones mark graves. And the people buried beneath them have some stories to tell.

Welcome to the Town Farm Cemetery, the final resting place for more than 40 people, many of whom lived — and suffered — at the notorious Portsmouth Asylum, the town’s 19th-century poorhouse.

The cemetery, roughly 90 feet long and 60 feet wide, contains 76 visible grave markers, both headstones and foot stones. Not a single one bears a name.

The graves date from 1836 to 1927, and the occupants represent a remarkable cross-section of humanity: the poor, the elderly, people with disabilities, Black and white residents, and those society simply didn’t know what to do with.

Some were infants. Others lived nearly a century.

Lewis Brooks was just 2 months old when he died after spending two weeks at the asylum. Henrieta Lawton, 74, spent the last 30 years of her life there.

And then there was Elizabeth Casey, who was shot by her husband at the coal mines.

The cemetery’s occupants weren’t necessarily all asylum residents. But for many, the institution was their last address.

In 1944, writer Maude Howe Elliott described the burial ground as a “Potter’s Field,” where gray stones marked the graves without names or dates.

Today, the Rhode Island Historic Cemetery Commission’s database identifies 44 people associated with the cemetery, although the markers themselves reveal nothing.

The last burial, in 1927, was an unidentified man. Nearly a century later, the stones remain. No names. No dates. No epitaphs.

Just a quiet hillside holding the secrets of Portsmouth’s forgotten dead.

— Jim McGaw

Editor's note: With Halloween fast upon us, we present this dramatization based on actual historical accounts about the notorious Portsmouth Asylum, which opened in 1832 and was finally sold off in 1929. The source material comes from Thomas Hazard’s “Report on the Poor and Insane in Rhode Island,” submitted to the Rhode Island General Assembly in January 1851; the Raytheon Employees Wildlife Habitat Committee; and the Portsmouth Historical Society. We owe them all a debt of gratitude for their research.

PORTSMOUTH — The brambles came first. They always do.

They crept over the old stones, bittersweet vines choking what little remained of the past.

Out on the southwest edge of the Raytheon property, where the ground dips into a hollow, the Portsmouth Asylum lay buried but not gone. You could still find it if you knew where to look: a sagging well, a cracked cistern holding dark rainwater, foundations slowly sinking into the earth. The deer still came. You could see their trails threading the thicket. They drank from the well.

Maybe they remembered. Because this quiet, overgrown patch of Rhode Island used to howl.

Back in the 1800s, Portsmouth liked to think of itself as a God-fearing town with clean hands and tidy consciences. It had been founded by religious exiles, after all — people who knew something about persecution and swore they’d never become the persecutors.

That promise didn’t last.

At first, they handled their poor the old-fashioned way: auctioning them off to the lowest bidder, like livestock. Or giving them a few coins — “outdoor relief,” they called it — and hoping charity would suffice.

Then the factories came, bringing machines, smoke and a growing population of struggling workers.

Suddenly there were too many poor, too many mouths, too many hands without work.

Asylum opened in 1832

So Portsmouth built an institution to house them. They called it an asylum. The Portsmouth Asylum opened in 1832 with a stated purpose of helping the unfortunate, reforming them and guiding them toward productive lives.

But the reality was far different.

Life inside was deliberately harsh, intended to discourage people from seeking public assistance. Deterrence, they called it.

If you were poor — really poor — you had two choices: scrape by on your own or surrender yourself to the overseer and enter the asylum. Most held out as long as they could.

Inside, the air stank of sweat and rot.

The rules came down hard and fast. Thirteen offenses, they said. Thirteen ways to earn yourself a trip to the dungeon. Bread, water, darkness. No appeal, no jury, no mercy. The keeper didn’t just enforce the rules; he served as accuser, judge and jailer.

Work filled the days. Or rather, it filled the hours between punishments.

Men and women — young, old, sick and infirm — labored in the fields and barns. They raised chickens, pigs and sheep. They churned butter, hauled seaweed, harvested apples by the bushel. And when winter came, they sat hunched over piles of old rope, picking oakum — pick, twist, pick, twist — until their fingers bled, their backs ached and their minds were numbed by repetition. All for a few cents a pound, to earn the food that barely kept them alive.

But perhaps the worst aspect of the asylum was whom they housed together: the elderly, the sick, the destitute and the mentally ill. No separation, no treatment, little understanding. Just people crowded into the same rooms, often frightened of one another.

Caroline, Ann, and Dennis

Caroline Albro knew that fear. She lived it.

An inmate at the asylum in the mid-1800s, Caroline would lie awake every night, listening and waiting. Somewhere in the dark, a woman was muttering to herself — low at first, then louder. The scrape of a chair. The sudden crack of wood against bone.

Caroline had already felt it once — a fire hook smashing into her arm, breaking it. Another time, she’d tried to save a child and was struck in the shoulder with a chair.

In a report to the Rhode Island General Assembly, Caroline blamed fellow inmate Mary Slocum for much of the abuse.

Caroline was lucky. Ann Cornell wasn’t.

Eighty-six years old and frail, she endured a beating from Mary with a broomstick from which she never recovered. The report would later say her death was “hastened.” A restrained word for a brutal end.

Then there was Dennis. They found him chained and bound, wrapped in sackcloth, lying on the floor.

Someone rolled an apple toward him. Dennis didn’t pick it up. He lunged at it, gnawing at the fruit where it lay on the dirt. His relatives, described as respectable and influential townspeople, tried desperately to have him transferred to a hospital where he might receive treatment. They failed.

Weeks or months later, Dorothea Dix, the nationally renowned advocate for the humane treatment of people with mental illness, visited the asylum, along with reformer Anna A. Jenkins. Nothing could save Dennis, however, who was soon dead. No treatment. No transfer. Just another victim of neglect.

A photo illustration of the Town Farm Cemetery, the final resting place of more than 40 people, many of whom lived at the town’s 19th-century poorhouse.

They lost.

At town meetings, men spoke openly about whipping the mentally ill, about maintaining order through physical punishment. Their remarks met with approval rather than outrage.

Finally, an end to suffering

Change came slowly.

A man named Thomas Hazard started writing things down. He described the dungeons, the chains, the beatings. He called for laws, reform and humane treatment. His 1851 report to the Rhode Island General Assembly was damning.

Eventually, people began to listen.

The mentally ill were sent elsewhere. The blind, the deaf and the children were transferred to institutions better equipped to care for them. The asylum gradually emptied until, sometime before the turn of the century, it closed.

The property was sold in 1929, and the buildings and their history faded from public memory.

Now the brambles have it. The well remains.